On PBS, Ric Burns Tells the Story of Eugene O'Neill's Turbulent Life

By JONATHAN KALB

March 27, 2006

Ric Burns has carved a special niche in documentary filmmaking by addressing some of the seamier aspects of American history (the Donner Party, Coney Island) and bringing them vividly to life with deep psychological perceptiveness. From one perspective, his latest work, "Eugene O'Neill" stems from a similar impulse.

For nearly two hours, this "American Experience" documentary, tonight on PBS, recounts what may be the most television-friendly life story in the history of playwriting. Its basic ingredients are like a lurid reality soap opera: family celebrity, tawdry domestic secrets, youthful dissipation, religious apostasy, self-aggrandizement packaged with self-loathing, wild public acclaim, multiple wives and children left floundering in the dust. To Mr. Burns's considerable credit, he finds O'Neill's beating heart.

The big question for many critics and writers is the extent to which O'Neill, the Nobel Prize-winning dramatist, ever really succeeded in manipulating his soap opera into great literature. Unfortunately, "Eugene O'Neill" (written by Mr. Burns and O'Neill's biographers, Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor of The New York Times, and Barbara Gelb) chooses not to address the doubters and smacks a bit of hagiography. Luckily, Mr. Burns is so good at creating filmic drama out of spare means that the reverential tone rarely cloys.

O'Neill was the unwanted youngest son of two self-involved malcontents: a matinee idol who sacrificed his serious acting talent for money, and a businessman's sheltered, Catholic daughter who became emotionally remote and addicted to morphine after giving birth to Eugene in 1888. This lonely and bitter boy's experience could easily have remained distant and abstract on film, but Mr. Burns has made it heartbreakingly palpable with a shrewd mixture of old photos, film clips, pictures of O'Neill's residences and interviews with contemporary actors, directors, playwrights and scholars.

As the story moves to O'Neill's desperate flight to Central America as a merchant sailor at 21  after he had been kicked out of Princeton, married on impulse and fathered a son  the mellifluous narrative voice of Christopher Plummer provides gravity, continuing through O'Neill's return to New York in 1912, when he hit bottom as a drunken derelict and attempted suicide in a bar he would later use as the setting for "The Iceman Cometh."

The film's most original aspect is its canny use of informal close-ups of some actors who have defined O'Neill's characters  Mr. Plummer, Al Pacino, Robert Sean Leonard, Zoe Caldwell, Liam Neeson and Jason Robards  shot without costumes, seated in chairs and reading from scripts. This choice was risky and pays off brilliantly, eliminating those pangs of disappointment inevitably produced by plays on film, and bringing the pacing and tone of the actors' speeches wholly under Mr. Burns's control.

O'Neill was hugely celebrated in his time. From his first Pulitzer Prize (for "Beyond the Horizon" in 1920) to his fourth (for "Long Day's Journey Into Night," awarded posthumously in 1957), he was treated as a national savior, proof at long last that America possessed a serious dramatist to hold up beside the likes of Ibsen and Strindberg.

With this relieved recognition, however, came a particular popularized narrative of his career as a prodigal-son story that survives intact in Mr. Burns's documentary: the child of privilege descends into the depths of dissipation and despair, eventually rescuing himself through pluck, honesty, hard work and the love of the right woman (after two wrong ones). Mr. Burns's film soft-pedals O'Neill's lifelong callousness to his three children, two of whom committed suicide, and says nothing about his cruel shunning of his daughter Oona after her marriage to the much older Charlie Chaplin.

Perhaps more important, though, the myth of O'Neill clothes an anti-modernist bias because it celebrates his move through supposedly immature avant-gardist experiments with expressionism, masks, interior monologues and split characters in earlier plays like "The Hairy Ape," "Strange Interlude" and "Anna Christie" before he finally buckled down to the good old-fashioned ruthless American realism that allowed him to tap his deeper lodes and produce late-career "masterpieces" like "The Iceman Cometh" and "Long Day's Journey Into Night."

Mr. Burns has interviewed some smart people with eloquent and perceptive things to say, including the playwright Tony Kushner, the critic Robert Brustein and the Gelbs. At no point in the film, however, do we catch wind of any countervailing views. No ordinary viewer would know that some very fine critics have challenged the majestic assessments of those masterpieces, or that a large faction of New York theatergoers regards nonrealistic recent stagings like the Wooster Group's "Emperor Jones" and "Hairy Ape" and Ivo van Hove's "More Stately Mansions" at New York Theater Workshop as the most vibrant O'Neill productions in decades.

Mr. Burns has composed a beautiful filmic love letter to an institutionalized saint. Evidently, the truly nuanced critical view of the man will take a while longer.